


HSWC 2013 Bonus Round One: collected fills

by chthonianCrocuta (lovesthesoundof)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-15
Updated: 2013-06-15
Packaged: 2017-12-15 01:37:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/843793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovesthesoundof/pseuds/chthonianCrocuta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The rest of my fills for Bonus Round One.  Warnings are for the first piece only; no warnings apply to the second and third.</p><p><i>What You Know [Dolorosa<3Mindfang, R]</i><br/>Minds can be changed.</p><p><i>Her Middle Name [Jane<3Porrim, T]</i><br/>Whenever there's trouble, she's at the bottom of it.</p><p><i>The Fine Art of Blindsiding (Nicely) [Calliope<3Jane, T]</i><br/>You were looking for love in the wrong place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. What You Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompted by aondeug of Team Aranea<3Porrim:
> 
> _Dolorosa <3Mindfang  
> "Is a slave a slave if he doesn't know he's enslaved?" "Yes." - Doctor Who_
> 
> Original post: http://hs-worldcup.dreamwidth.org/3493.html?thread=659877#cmt659877

You remember land. Though it seems sweeps since you last set foot on it, you remember the shore, the rush and roar of the rolling breakers against the rocks.

Do you remember the first time you heard the sea?

You came up in the desert, sweeps upon sweeps ago when life began. The sands have waves too. You have seen them shift and flow at the wind's calling, a myriad little pinpricks of silica gathered into dips and swells of whispering gold, the crests alive with stinging spray. They seemed endless when you were young, but you learned the limits of them. You crossed them for him, carrying him in your arms, your mantle shielding his precious eyes from the sun.

You had feared nothing, then, nothing save that he might be taken from you - but when you reached the shore the sea frightened you. Its songs were unknown to you; they seemed faster and deeper and wilder than the hissing of the sands, and you felt, as you never had before, that you might be swallowed up.

Perhaps you were too awed by its savage beauty, as a squeakbeast before a predator, to remember that it too was merely a desert - though of salt water, not of sand - and that it too must have limits.

Finding those limits came to you later. You try not to think of the days before you fell into her life, though some days the memories creep in unbidden. Blood on his hands. His red tears on your cheek. The heat of glowing iron on your face, and the smell of burning meat. His very last word - not your name, but a visceral howl of rage the like of which you knew not had lain within him. You have all but forgotten your former master, but this, all this, it haunts you still. It comes to you in the night as you lie alone, trying to sleep. Sometimes you cry out for him still.

Sometimes, when you cry out, she comes to you.

You remember the first time you laid eyes on the Marquise Mindfang. The images are hazy, thanks to the conditions under which your former master had kept you, but the heart of it is as crisp as a dark season's first dawn. You remember how you felt upon meeting her eyes, how even then something _else_ had begun to claw through your fear and make itself known. There was something compelling about her, you thought. Something extraordinary.

Even with the threat of hot irons to stir you to action, it surprised you how keen you were to please her - and how glad you were to succeed.

In the growing dark of the next evening, you feared that happiness. You felt yourself undeserving. You disbelieved the tenderness you had seen in such terrible eyes. Perhaps it was a mixture of both that led your feet to the deck - for she, in the flush of first pity, had trusted you enough not to chain you. Perhaps it was the pain of all you had lost that made you think of casting yourself into the waves, and the fear that you might never escape that pain that made you wander so near the rail that you might fall overboard.

That night, you felt the grip of her mind for the first time. She was artless with blind panic, clumsily puppeting your body away from the edge, and once she had you in her arms again you felt the jerk as she withdrew.

"How dare you," said her mouth. "You are not your own to destroy so carelessly. Have you forgotten that I own your very soul?"

But her eyes said _do not leave me_ , and it was them, and the fervour of her embrace, that you believed.

From that day to this she has kept you close. You feel guarded as jealously as a dragon's hoard; it is strange to you, beautiful and strange, to be considered a precious thing. It troubles you to think such things when the memory of your red-blooded boy is still so painfully near, but sometimes you wonder if you have ever been so wanted as you are now. Your boy never asked of your heart with such eyes as she does - like a moirail, almost, edging pale - and if he had you doubt you would have felt so free to let him take your pain. She knows you better than you know her (and you know her very well, by necessity), and yet she does not turn from what so many have called heresies. She asks. She listens. Sometimes she smiles. Always, always, she takes you into the beating heart of her, and even as you feel your mind slip beneath the waves of ecstacy you know she is kissing the tear tracks from your cheeks.

Was this what your boy meant when he spoke of a love no quadrant could contain?

You pity her. You pity her in the long hours of the day, as you hold her in your arms and watch her sleep. You pity her in the dark, as you watch her dance through your dreams. You pity her keenly in the mornings and evenings, your territory, the two of you together on the edges of sleeping and waking. She has such pride, such passion, such _presence_. Even without her hat and coat, unarmed and unprotected, she seems a giant among trolls. But you, you who know her heart, know better. On the days she comes to you triumphant, with a swagger in her step and digits raised at the shadow of death, still you pity her - but some days she comes to you with ancient eyes, the look in them worn smooth, weathered with the passing of sweeps, and on those days she does seem smaller without her tricorn hat, thinner without her frock coat, weaker without her sword. On those days you pity her most of all, not least for knowing you must be the only living creature she can trust to see her thus diminished.

You ache with how you pity her, and you are glad of the marks your long-abandoned collar left on your throat, for you think they make her ache for you, too.

One night, while skirting the boundaries of the seventh sea (for all seven have boundaries), she kept you awake past dark and took you ashore. She led you to a cave where once she had stored her treasure, and by the light of your skin she showed you an ancient stone with deep, smooth furrows running through it.

"Do you see, my pet?" she said, smiling with all her fangs. "It was water that left these tracks here, over many sweeps. Longer, perhaps, than our two lifetimes passed while such a thing took shape, and though there is no water to run through the channel any longer, the shape endures. This is true power, my dear one. Not to move, no, nor to crush - to change the very nature of a thing, and leave your mark upon it long after your touch is gone."

She was the eighth sea to you, in that moment, and you saw in her the power to change the world.

How you loved her then.

How you love her still.

You remember land. Though it seems sweeps since you last set foot on it, you remember the shore, the rush and roar of the rolling breakers against the sand.

Hundreds of sweeps ago - but not many - those grains of sand were rocks.

Do they remember?

If channels of water run between them, do they question the forms into which they are guided?

And do they remember, after all these sweeps, that it was the water that first made them soft enough to shape?

No matter. These are merely your own idle thoughts, running away with themselves again.

You always were a gr8 thinker.


	2. Her Middle Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompted by aondeug of Team Aranea<3Porrim:
> 
> _Jane <3Porrim  
> "And if you're referring to the incident with the dragon I just gave your uncle a nudge out the door." - Gandalf, the Lord of the Rings film trilogy._
> 
> Original post: http://hs-worldcup.dreamwidth.org/3493.html?thread=1379237#cmt1379237

"I have a question to put to you," says Jane, and then thinks better of it. " - No, wait a minute - I have three questions."

Porrim yawns expansively. Against black lips, her fangs gleam white. "Some days, my dear," she says, her mouth curving into a lazy smile, "I believe you're _made_ of questions. Ask away."

"Firstly: why is it that whenever your friends and my friends meet, there's always such a lot of trouble?"

"Because trolls, humans and cherubs - "

"We only have the one cherub," Jane points out. Callie may be big enough for two people, but as far as Jane's concerned they can all afford to be very grateful that she's now just the one.

" - you're right, excuse me - trolls, humans and _cherub_ do not always mix well. We come from three different species and a number of different cultures, so our expectations of one another don't always gel. That happens with any group of people, but it's that much more pronounced with us." For a moment Jane thinks that's it, but Porrim's elegant shrug leads into an afterthought. "On top of that, broadly speaking we're a bunch of total crackpots, opinionated asshats and habitual troublemakers, so if you put a lot of us in one place we're almost inevitably going to raise hell." She closes her eyes for a moment, then flicks them open and looks up at Jane through the lashes. She's smirking a little. "Satisfied?"

As attractive as that look is, Jane's not about to be dissuaded. She puts on her best look of righteous affront - which is a pretty darn good one, if she does say so herself - and presses on. "Oh, I am _far_ from satisfied. I haven't even got to question two yet!"

Porrim yawns again. It took Jane a while to realise that this isn't an insult in Porrim's culture; it's a sign of relaxation, of security in the company one keeps. "Then perhaps you'd better ask it."

"Fine! Secondly: why is it that whenever there's trouble between your friends and my friends, I always find _you_ at the bottom of it?"

"Because I hear a lot of things from a lot of people - and despite what you may have heard about my quadrant turnover, I'm not interested in being everybody's moirail. If they want to do stupid things and cause chaos, I'm in no hurry to stop them." This earns Porrim narrowed eyes from Jane: she knows darn well what's being alluded to, and Jane doesn't appreciate vague generalisations and beating about the bush. Fortunately, Porrim decides against any further shrubbery abuse. "And if you're referring to the incident with the dragon, I can't claim credit for the level of stupidity your gunslinging guy-crush is capable of." Jane folds her arms, unimpressed by the epithet, and Porrim shrugs again. "The plan was his; I just gave him a nudge out the door. I thought it'd take him down a few pegs, not to mention give him a long-overdue lesson in what little Pyropes are made of."

She grins, and despite herself Jane feels her lip twitch in response. All right, she has to admit that Jake _did_ have it coming - but that doesn't excuse Porrim's _meddling_! What is it with Maryams and meddling? Jake gets into quite enough trouble without any outside assistance, let alone from someone who's more than capable of seducing just about anyone into doing just about anything, no matter how monumentally brainless -

"...You want me to ask you what the third question is, or are you going to - "

" _And thirdly_ \- " Aided by the train of thought, Jane leaps right back into her stride. " - why, why, _why_ is it that whenever I come out here to yell at you for being at the bottom of whatever trouble you've caused, I always end up _sleeping_ with you instead?"

Porrim laughs, a low chuckle that's dark as treacle, and stretches out in the bed, folding one arm behind her head. The bold black swirls of her tattoos highlight the shift of muscles under her skin; their progression down her chest teases at what the sheet just barely conceals. Her smile is pure confidence. "Gee, you know, I just _can't imagine_."

The sheer arrogance of the statement ought to irk her, Jane suspects, but she can't help but feel the arrogance is warranted. "I'm beginning to think there's a fourth question here."

Porrim watches her through half-lidded eyes as she moves closer. "And it is?"

Jane smiles and shakes her head. "What," she says, reaching out to smooth a lock of dark hair away from Porrim's face, "am I going to do with you?"

As Jane's fingers pass by dark lips, Porrim kisses the tips of them lightly. "I don't know," she answers with an easy smile, her fingers already threading into Jane's hair, "but I'm _definitely_ looking forward to finding out."

A few minutes later a fifth question occurs to Jane - namely _how do you do that thing with your tongue_ \- but, given that Porrim has rendered her temporarily speechless, she's forced to shelve the query for another time.


	3. The Fine Art of Blindsiding (Nicely)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompted by libraryseraph of team Calliope<3Jane<3Roxy:
> 
> _Calliope <3Jane  
> "You'll be given love/You have to trust it/Maybe not from the directions/You are staring at/Twist your head around/It's all around you/all is full of love" - Bjork_
> 
> Original post: http://hs-worldcup.dreamwidth.org/3493.html?thread=1415589#cmt1415589

"I haven't thought about him."

Callie, stretched out on a king-sized mattress across the room, turns her head to you. "Beg pardon, love?"

"Jake." You scramble off your bed and pad over to her, scrolling back to the right place in your phone's picture gallery. "I was going through these photographs from the last jaunt to LOFAF, and I found the one where - did I ever show you this?"

The picture you show her is one of Jake's feet, complete with flippers, sticking up out of a shallow pool of water. The top of his head and the tip of a snorkel are also visible. A frog has settled itself in amongst his hair. In the foreground, a rather blurry Jade is doubled up in fits of laughter. Callie giggles at it behind a hand that could cover the whole of your face. "Good gracious! The poor bugger!"

You smile wryly. "Don't feel too sorry for him; he brought it on himself. Anyway...I saw that and I suddenly realised I haven't thought about him all day."

Callie runs her fingers through your hair. "Well done you," she says, and smiles. It occurs to you, not for the first time, that she does a lot of her smiling with her eyes; when the smile starts to fade, you see it there first. "...Is it all right for me to say as much?"

"Of course! Why wouldn't it be?"

She looks awkward. Tragically, it suits her. "The redder forms of romance were something I studied in great depth, but always from afar. I never fully understood them, and I'm unsure as to whether I ever truly can. As far as I've been led to believe, that usually forbids one from holding much of an opinion on a subject."

You sigh. "Oh dear god. Has Vantas the Elder been lecturing you? - Nevermind." She looked about to answer in the affirmative, and your blood pressure doesn't need another reason to want to go and trigger Kankri Vantas in the tall pants right now. "Forget him for the moment. If you have an opinion, I _always_ want to hear it." _So long as it doesn't involve any more magical lollipops,_ you think to yourself, but you don't say it out loud because Callie's already apologised for that little cross-cultural gaffe about a thousand times.

"Very well, if you're sure..." She licks her teeth with the tip of her tongue, which you suspect is analogous to wetting one's lips in preparation to speak. "It seems to me, as a result of my careful research, that the one best equipped to decide how much suffering it is appropriate to endure in the name of a possible romantic interest is the person undergoing said suffering. Indeed, some media presents any attempt to dissuade the suffering party as a serious faux pas. However, were I you...were I a beautiful human with curves and soft hair and a warm, red heart..." She strokes your hair, a wistful look in her eyes. "...I think I should prefer to pursue someone who appreciated those qualities in me, rather than stumble along in the wake of someone who barely turned to look at me."

"That's the conclusion I've belatedly come to as well." You can feel yourself blushing a little, and you hunt around for an excuse to be doing so; better that than to try to tell Callie her clumsy, earnest compliments make you feel warmer than any amount of skilful flirtation. You don't want to pull her into a world that isn't truly hers. If she steps in on her own, that's fine; pressuring her, even unintentionally, is unthinkable. "Honestly I feel like a bit of an idiot. I wasted a lot of time looking for love in completely the wrong place."

Callie makes a little ho-hum noise. "It appears to happen to the best of us. Where do you think you might look for it next?"

You shrug eloquently, comfortable enough in the presence of a close friend to forget to be ladylike. "I don't know yet. I think I just want to sit back and watch for a while. If something falls into my lap I'm not about to ignore it, but I'm not going to go on an expedition after it either."

"That seems a wise course of action," says Callie, and you know that's not all she has to say. She has that uncomfortable, waiting look about her. Sure enough, a few moments later she continues. "...Thank you for allowing me to take part in the discussion. Since it's likely the closest I'll ever come to love, it means a lot to me."

You put your phone down and shuffle a bit closer. "You don't know that for sure, though. You might find that it's not as impossible as you think. Sure, I'll grant you the biology is difficult, but red love isn't _all_ about sex." You're aware that you're grasping at straws, but not quite sure whether you're doing so for her sake or your own. You do so hate feeling that she's left out. "Anyway," you press on, picking up her nearest hand and squeezing it in both of your own, "even if you never do have red feelings for anyone you still have a lot of love in your life. Even if it's not romantic, you have all of us. You have Roxy. You have me."

"Ah yes, this cross-species communicable disease called friendship," Callie sighs, and laughs quietly. She has a good laugh. She has a good voice, too. It's deeper than you thought it would be, rich and resonant even when soft; if ever she raised it, you think she could shout down the walls of some modern Jericho. "I hadn't forgotten you, Jane. Nor anyone else." The look in her eyes is tender, and you see that, not her classically frightening face, as she confesses, "...I think it would be quite impossible to forget you."

At that moment it occurs to you that the sweetest things you've ever had said to you - the top five, at least, and perhaps more - have all been said by Callie, and it makes you impulsive enough to press a soft kiss to the circle of one green cheek. Her exoskeletal plates are cool and firm, but not unpleasantly hard or rough to the touch. Unable to kiss you in return, she gently rests her forehead on yours for a moment and scratches lightly at your scalp, the latter not unlike how Roxy will fuss over a kitten.

You can stand to be fussed over, you think. It's rather nice.

Warmed from within and already a little sleepy, you settle yourself in beside her and lay your head on her shoulder. Unbidden, she wraps her nearest wing around you. You remember how these grew, infused with the life magic you now command. She's grown a lot since you first met, thanks to you. She'll never be as big as her brother was, true, but she has her adult plates and the wings work like a dream. It was the least you could do, you thought, for a dear friend left behind by the world.

(Left behind by you too, if you're honest. Maybe more of it was about guilt than you'd like to admit.)

Her other wing comes around you. They're not as fluffy as they look from a distance, and in places they're slightly tickly, but they're strong and secure and that's more than enough. You love that she can do this now. She used to do something like it even when all she could offer was grey text on a screen - make you feel surrounded by her presence, warm and protected - but the tactile sensation of it is so much better.

Come to think of it, you love a lot of things about Callie.

"By the by," says said cherub then, trying for nonchalance and falling a little short, "since you're not currently in pursuit of anyone in particular, it occurs to me to mention that while I'm only dubiously capable of red affections, I am both willing to experiment and in possession of a fourteen-inch tongue."

For the first few moments you think your ears might have deceived you, but when you look up Callie is wearing the sort of innocent smile that ought not to be possible with the face of a giant green skull-monster, but somehow, given _her_ face, is. As if to confirm that the aforementioned fourteen inches of tongue weren't an auditory hallucination, she adds, "I just thought I'd...what's that wonderful phrase? Oh yes - put that out there. Just in case you should happen to be curious."

"Um." That's about all you can venture until you've blinked a few times and let the flood of mental images subside a little. "Okay. Give me a bit on that one? Let it, uh...percolate."

"Naturally," says Callie, settling her wing more comfortably around you. "Whatever you require."

You end up falling asleep on her chest instead, but even after the next morning's fond farewell the images haven't gone away.


End file.
